willcode4beer Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:17:24 +0000 http://willcode4beer.com/ Paul Davis 10 1 10 Wed, 25 June 2008 10:08:00 +0000 This morning the final release of Eclipse Ganymede arrived so, I decided to give it a run. I experienced some quirks with Ganymede RC4, so I decided to wait for the final release. I'm using the version for J2EE developers. http://willcode4beer.com/opinion.jsp?set=ganymedeReview willCode4Beer review eclipse eclipse ganymede eclipse 3.4 Tue, 24 June 2008 15:08:00 +0000 Anyone using Maven has no doubt become fatigued with the long command line options and suffered from dumb typos. Then again, maybe it's just me.... I'm a big fan of auto-completion in the bash shell. So, I decided it was long past time to set-up auto completion goodness for my maven commands. There are a couple of steps to this. First, make sure you have bash completion installed (most linux distros do by default). Next, is to install the maven completion file. http://willcode4beer.com/tips.jsp?set=tabMaven willCode4Beer maven bash auto completion completion Wed, 11 June 2008 08:08:00 +0000 To support testing with Selenium, I found that screen shots would be useful. Here's the snippet of code to make them happen. http://willcode4beer.com/tips.jsp?set=javaScreenshot willCode4Beer Tue, 27 May 2008 08:08:00 +0000 It seems like integration tests with Maven are an afterthought. Don't get me wrong, I think Maven is one of the best build tools so far. Sure, it has its warts, the documentation is weak (at best), and the learning curve is steep. But, once you get a project going, it's pretty much smooth sailing. Telling people how to build a project is reduced to saying, check it out of version control and run "mvn package". Want to run a local copy of the app, "mvn tomcat:run". Pretty sweet. http://willcode4beer.com/opinion.jsp?set=maven2_integration-test willCode4Beer java screenshot Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:08:00 +0000 In reponse to a post on the Webmaster Talk Forum requesting information on generating a random link with random colored letters. I decided to take an object based approach. http://willcode4beer.com/tips.jsp?set=colorLinks willCode4Beer Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:08:00 +0000 For April Fool's here is the quintessential program to change the ready message on an HP printer (in Java). http://willcode4beer.com/opinion.jsp?set=hp_ready_message willCode4Beer Tue, 07 Mar 2008 08:08:00 +0000 The nature of the site has changed a lot in the most recent few weeks. Perhaps for the better for some, for me, it's a turn for the worse. I'm trying to make up for it by using tags instead of the whole list. Discovering the Zone I discovered DZone on a fluke. I was trolling the referrer logs for my site when I noticed a large number of visitors coming from DZone. I'd never heard of it and paid a visit. Turns out someone had posted one of my pages there. http://willcode4beer.com/opinion.jsp?set=what_happended_to_dzone willCode4Beer Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 Here are some of the things I might ask in an interview. I admit, I'm not the best interviewer, I'm a developer. But, I am part of the hiring process for new developers (and should be). I know many other developers are placed in the same situation. I hope to share my experience and learn from others. They aren't listed in any particular order and this is neither comprehensive or complete. I'm not worried about publishing it because if a fraction of the people I interview actually took the step of reading the first few pages of Google results for whatever they are interviewing for they'd be ahead anyway. http://willcode4beer.com/opinion.jsp?set=interviewQ willCode4Beer Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 The default tooltips shown by browsers for the title attribute of an element can leave a bit to be desired. Here I will present a technique to display custom tooltips in a little balloon or bubble. The application will require one image, a little bit of CSS, and some javascript. The image, shown on the right, is just a GIF file. Normally, I'd recommend a PNG, but, Internet Explorer has some issues with them. http://willcode4beer.com/tips.jsp?set=bubbleTooltips willCode4Beer Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 Much has been written about how the quote tag <Q> tag has no support in Internet Explorer. Many have complained that due to the age of the tag, they are greatly surprised that it has been ignored. To give Microsoft some credit, at least they created a facility to extend support within the browser through the addition of behaviors. http://willcode4beer.com/tips.jsp?set=fixIEQuotes willCode4Beer Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 I recently picked up the Joel on Software book. After reading his chapter on "Painless Software Schedules", I decided that the schedules could be done with a simple XML file and a nice little XSLT to transform it into (X)HTML. Considering that transformation is built into all of the most popular browsers, anybody should be able to view it without the need to run Excel. Avoiding the startup time for Excel just to view a schedule is just a bonus. http://willcode4beer.com/design.jsp?set=sched willCode4Beer Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 There's been a lot of talk lately about rarely used HTML tags (or the HTML tags you didn't know existed). Most give one line sentences about how they are supposed to be used but, fail to provide any meat. They don't show how the tags can be useful, so, the info just gets filed away. To be fair, part of the problem is how some of them are defined and rendered. Lets take the CITE tag for instance. It is defined, it "indicates a reference to work, such as a book, report or web site." Most browsers just italicize the text. <sarcasm> thats real useful... How about linking to the web site, proving some information about the book or report? http://willcode4beer.com/design.jsp?set=littleUsedHtml willCode4Beer Mon, 04 Feb 2008 08:08:00 +0000 In keeping with my principle that tools should help work go faster and that less time should be spent playing with tools (and more time working), I'm offering up my todo list solution. Note this is inspired by the GTD and 43Folders folks. Basically, the idea is to use a super simple XML file, much like the software schedules , and use an XSLT to format it into a viewable format. Since modern web browsers have a processor built in, no special software is needed. A simple text editor (VI, emacs, Notepad, etc) will suffice for changes. http://willcode4beer.com/design.jsp?set=todoList willCode4Beer i